In the time of global changes and transformations, the question of forming of the new cultural paradigm in response to the emergence of online networks, post-industrial economy and increasing massization of societies, comes to the forefront. Identifying the concept of «mediocrity» in the history of social and humanitarian thought, denoting its ambiguity and determinism by various social factors at different times, this work is designed to substantiate the phenomenon of mediocrity, which organically stems from the evolution of cultural space from Theological to technological world view.
The research focuses on the concept of mediocrity as the central dominant feature of the present. It raises the following questions: the position of mediocrity, its role and place in societies, features of mediocrity, key factors in the formation of mediocrity, the space within which mediocrity is located, etc. Using culturological approach as central to the study of the problem set by the thesis, the author achieves several important links in the research, i.e. the definition of mediocrity as a phenomenon, closely connected to the technological culture of today and the definition of an online network as a place in which mediocrity is formed as a social given. Developing conceptual and categorial apparatus in the framework of the study of mediocrity, it is appropriate to focus on the need to introduce into scientific circulation the notions that clarify the processes that are substantially present in mediocrity, i.e. of aborted thinking and truncated sign.
The problem of mediocrity should be considered in the broad context of the research of mass culture as well as internet culture, which deepens the massization of the present. This paper considers mediocrity from two sides. First, as a set of typological features that form a constructive image of mediocrity, based on the analysis
of content, extracted from the depths of the online network. Second, as a set of multiplicity, that by the very fact of its existence reproduces the internet network as a plane of the possible and in which mediocrity is formed as a social phenomenon. It was at the second stage of considering mediocrity that the author made the transition from
axiological approach to the analysis of the background on which mediocrity grows, — the correlation of technologies (social networks, browsers, internet space as such) and the politics (political and ideological struggle unfolding in social networks). In this way, mediocrity is interpreted from two sides: as the state that the individual is placed in, and as a socio-cultural dominant of contemporaneity, made possible owing to a mass
production, development of informational technologies and political struggle. Culture in this case experiences transformational changes, moving from the culturally existing production (that which lies in the plane of the real) into culturally possible (a virtual space in which cultural products are in a purely symbolic state, but acquire, in concert to the contemporaneity, a meaning more real than the reality itself). It is proven that the studies of mediocrity concern not only the understanding of the subject that consumes the virtual product, but also the one who creates it. In this ratio, the analysis of the content in the virtual plane is conducted to identify the main features of mediocrity in the frames of the prevailing trends. In turn, the analysis of trends makes it possible to
identify the typology of values of mediocrity as a socio-cultural dominant.
